They say good news in the morning bring fairly positive mood throughout the day. This saying was borne out by my recent experience of having a random check of our website’s page rank. On seeing the figure 7, I could not resist posting an ego-flattering message on Facebook, containing the screenshot and the caption that read: “For those who understand what I am speaking about ... :) HURRRRAH!!” In fact, those in the know have already left many positive comments, but I should now try to briefly explain what happened for those who would like to understand what this parameter means to us, that is, the web editorial staff and the online version of The Day.
Google, the search engine which everyone knows and almost everyone uses in the Ukrainian segment of the net, ranks sites according to its own undisclosed criteria and algorithms. The SEO managers, who are responsible for optimizing content for search engines, regularly make dreams come true, and spend a lot of time trying to understand the intricacies of the search engines’ vision and their approaches to ranking websites. Their hard work allows the users to get relevant search results [relevance is the ratio of the desired results to the obtained ones. – Ed.]. The rank 7 indicates that Google is putting The Day’s site in a very high position, with our articles appearing even more often on the first pages of search results, placing The Day’s site in the select group of most publicized Ukrainian media sites. For example, Ukrainian Wikipedia and Facebook are ranked at 9, while rank 10 has been achieved by only a few sites in the world, including US government’s site, Twitter, and UN’s site.
Of course, this parameter is not all-encompassing. It is also rather subjective as a whole site evaluation tool, because there are quite a few systems for evaluating quality of web resources’ functioning. But still, it means, first of all, that The Day’s online content is among the most quoted and unique in the Ukrainian segment of Internet. Without exaggerations or false modesty, we can say that our work has brought a tangible result, with more and more people turning to the new site that we launched in November 2012. With dynamically increasing ranking positions, we are now reaping the fruits of the sleepless nights, writing thousands of lines of code and the dedicated work of that handful of The Day’s web editorial staff as well as the newspaper’s employees in general. The success has brought with it the great responsibility we owe to our readers who appreciate our work. We, in our turn, will work now and in the future to live up to the expectations and tastes of our intellectual audience. There is a reason to rejoice!
